While Laurids held forth on the subject, the church filled with women who'd been given permission to come daily with their baskets to hawk coffee, cakes, sour bread, eggs, butter, cheese, herring, and paper. The men from the Gefion had money to spend: before throwing the ship's coffer overboard to prevent the enemy getting hold of it, the officers had opened it and given each crew member a couple of coins, and most of us had managed to save our sea bags.
We Marstallers considered ourselves privileged: we'd all been on board the Gefion, except for Laurids, who'd recovered nothing from the Christian the Eighth except the clothes on his back and, of course, his reputation as an astral traveler. However, the latter was enough to secure him a considerable income. His pockets were stuffed full of five-mark coins given to him by curious Germans. When he saw that we had everything we needed, Laurids bought extra provisions and distributed them among the crew from the Christian the Eighth, who, like him, had been forced to abandon ship without their possessions. They received his gifts with gratitude and this enhanced his reputation even further.
When we woke up, it was Easter Sunday—and we were to spend it locked up in a church without a clergyman in sight. We lay on our backs on the straw, gazing up at the soaring, pinnacled arches high above us. All around were dark paintings with heavy gilded frames, and carved wooden figures, and from the ceilings, which were as high as masts, hung chandeliers: all a far cry from Marstal's church, with its blue-painted pews and plain, whitewashed walls. But we weren't in any mood for worship, lying there in the straw. Straw was for farmyard animals, and we felt like pigs in a sty: the church's grandiose arches prompted not so much a feeling of religious contemplation as a sense of humiliation and mockery. For we were beaten men, robbed not only of our freedom but also—far worse—our pride. We hadn't fought with honor. Later we would probably be informed otherwise—and perhaps one day some of us might end up believing it. But right now, the events of Eckernförde Fjord were fresh in our minds, and they told the story straight. We'd been confused and panicky—and yes, even drunk too—and those of us who were skilled sailors weren't trained as soldiers, and those with military expertise knew nothing of seafaring.
Captain Krieger had been blown up, together with his wife's portrait (and the Lord have mercy on his soul, the poor bewildered wretch) while Commander Paludan had been the first to board the lifeboat and be rowed ashore to safety. Was this conduct becoming of a commander? An act an honest seaman could respect?
Sitting there on the straw like the pathetic creatures we were, we gazed up at the arches. And from high above, they jeered back.
Pails of schnapps could be found in several corners of the church, and we were offered all we could drink, for free. The hawkers didn't sell strong liquor, but from the very first day of our captivity, the German army doctor had decreed schnapps to be good for the health, and we headed for the buckets like pigs to the trough. Yes, we were indeed like pigs, sleeping and rolling around on the straw: pigs that had temporarily avoided the butcher's knife. We might be alive, but we were no longer human.
And we stank too. We'd soiled our clothes during the battle, and we reeked of fear and uncontrolled bowels. For isn't it a secret common to all men that if you go to war, you'll fill your pants like a frightened child? As seamen, we'd all feared drowning, but none of us had ever crapped his pants when a gale ripped off the mast and rigging, or a wave crushed the rail and cleared the deck.
What was the difference? The difference was that the sea respected our manhood. The cannons didn't.
"Hey, heavenly traveler," we called out to Laurids, and pointed to the pulpit. "It's Easter Sunday. Give us a sermon! Tell us about Saint Peter and his bare ass!"
Stumbling slightly, Laurids climbed the stairs to the pulpit. His elation had subsided and he was drunk again, like the rest of us. The pulpit was no mast top, but once up there he grew dizzy all the same. It was the schnapps. He'd been shipwrecked twice in his life. The second time he'd stood a whole night on a flat rock in the sea off Mandal, where his ship had gone down. There he'd felt both grief and terror, and he'd been within an inch of death. The water had slapped at his feet until dawn, when a pilot boat came and threw him a line. He'd felt no shame on that occasion, for it was no shame to be defeated by the sea. He wasn't a bad sailor. He knew that. The current, the wind, and the dark had simply got the better of him. But in the battle on the fjord, where his seamanship had counted for nothing, a lesser enemy had defeated him, and that defeat and his commander's unmanly conduct had left him without honor.
When he stood on the pulpit, he found he had nothing to say. His gullet stung. Then he leaned forward and threw up.
We greeted this with cheering and applause.
Here was a sermon we could all appreciate.
Laurids remained silent the rest of the day. Once again, officers and local bigwigs turned up to visit him and hear the story of his ascension, but he turned his back to them in the straw, like a hibernating bear. They offered him money, but nothing could tempt him out of his retreat and in the end they had no choice but to leave. His fame dwindled in the days that followed. It would have been lucrative to put himself on display, press the flesh, and expound his views of the Hereafter. But he was in the grip of a foul mood.
He lay on the straw or paced up and down with his arms folded across his chest, frowning.
"He's thinking," Ejnar said, filled with awe.
Ejnar was Laurids's only remaining disciple. But he could have spawned a whole sect if he'd wanted to.
***
As for the rest of us, our mood had improved; we gathered in small groups, and soon music and singing echoed from various corners of the church. At first we'd grouped according to our home districts, islands, or towns and looked at one another almost as enemies. But music united us. Here was a man from one of the islands next to a man from Jutland, here a man from Lolland next to a man from Seeland. As long as our voices were in harmony, it didn't matter that our accents were at war. That said, all the melodies came courtesy of the schnapps pail.
A few days later Little Clausen received a letter from home. It was from his mother, who gave him her version of the fateful Maundy Thursday when the battle took place. Ejnar and Laurids settled down beside him on the straw, and Torvald Bønnelykke joined them. We were all eager to hear news from home. Little Clausen read aloud in a stumbling voice, with long pauses.
His mother wrote that they'd heard the cannon fire in Marstal from early morning, and it was loud enough for you to think the battle was being fought at the end of the breakwater, rather than on the other side of the Baltic. The thundering had been especially fierce during Pastor Zachariassen's sermon in the church; the ground had literally trembled beneath their feet, and the minister had been moved to tears.
Around noon it grew quiet, but no one could relax. Instead of going home for lunch, the citizens of Marstal wandered the streets, discussing the course of the battle. A few men with combat experience, such as Petersen the carpenter and old Jeppe, and even Madam Weber—all veterans of the great mobilization, the night we thought the Germans were coming—had insisted that there was no way we Danes could lose. A ship-of-the-line could never be defeated by a coastal battery. The Germans must have got a good thrashing: what they'd been hearing all day was unquestionably the sweet music of victory.
Toward evening came a boom so gigantic that it collapsed the cliffs at Voderup. No one in Marstal got a wink of sleep all night, tormented by a creeping unease about the battle's outcome. News finally reached them well into the afternoon of Good Friday, a day that must have been as tough for them as it was for our savior. For now their worst fears were confirmed.
"I was completely beside myself with despair, though I should have put my trust in the Lord. I prayed to Him all night to keep you safe and He heard my prayers, though there were others He did not heed. Kresten's mother walks around with a tearful face and blames herself for not forcing him to stay behind. I tell her that Kresten foretold h
is own death and that no one cheats fate, but she says that Kresten had lost his wits, and it is a mother's duty to shield her son from his own lack of sense, and then she starts to cry again."
Little Clausen read all of this in a monotone. The strain of deciphering the letters required every ounce of his concentration; he had none left to understand the meaning of the words he was repeating.
"What does it say?" he suddenly asked.
We gave him a blank look.
"You're the one doing the reading," Ejnar said.
Little Clausen looked helplessly at them, unable to explain his predicament.
"Well, it says that we lost," Laurids snapped. "But we don't need her to tell us that. And then it says that Kresten's mother has lost her wits from grief. And that your mother has been praying for you."
"My mother has been praying for me?"
Little Clausen looked down and with some difficulty found the line where his mother described her sleepless night. Then he read it again, his lips moving silently as he did so.
"Read on," Ejnar implored him. "What else does she say?"
Marstal had been issued a royal decree to send all its large vessels to the navy immediately, in order to transport troops across the Great Belt. But although every sailor in town had gathered in the schoolroom to listen to the order, not one volunteered to comply. Eighteen vessels were then commandeered—but when the day of their departure dawned, the ships were gone. From the pulpit, Pastor Zachariassen lambasted the people of Marstal for their lack of self-sacrificial spirit, after which the townsfolk began to talk of replacing him. Everything was in confusion. There was a war on, and times were harsh, but if only the good Lord would protect Little Clausen and the rest of Marstal, all this misery would surely have to end someday, and things could return to normal. Little Clausen's mother ended her letter by conveying her most fervent prayers and loving thoughts to her captive son, and expressing the hope that he was getting enough to eat and keeping his clothes neat and clean.
"Lack of self-sacrificial spirit!" Laurids fumed when Little Clausen had concluded his reading. "That pastor's got a nerve! Seven men are dead and the rest of us are prisoners. We're prepared to give up our lives. But is that enough for him, the devil? No: he wants our ships too. But he won't get them. Never!"
The others nodded their agreement.
The mornings began with warm beer, with bland gruel and prunes one day, split peas and meat the next. Our stomachs soon adapted to the pattern; they had no choice, and besides, we'd had worse at sea, working for stingy skippers, so we complained mainly for the sake of complaining. They'd confiscated our knives, so we had to tear our bread or gnaw at it like horses. For one hour, morning and afternoon, we were allowed to stroll around the churchyard and smoke, while the sentries watched over us with loaded guns. There, we'd let our eyes wander from headstone to bayonet and back again, and if we fancied it, philosophize about the meaning of life. That was as much variety as our captivity afforded.
A FORTNIGHT LATER they woke us at five in the morning and ordered us into the churchyard, where they lined us up in ranks. We were six hundred men in all, and we were joined by the junior officers, whom the Germans had been holding in a riding school. Our guards felt we were in need of discipline, and who better to knock it into our heads than our own cadets?
We marched out of Rendsburg with our sea bags on our shoulders and our food bowls tucked under our arms. Our arrival in the small town of Glückstadt was met by thousands of onlookers. No longer covered in powder residue and at last wearing clean clothes, we almost resembled human beings, so it wasn't our appearance so much as our quantity that made an impact on the townsfolk.
We marched down to the harbor, where we were to be billeted in a grain warehouse. Inside there was a lower and an upper loft, with a separate room in each where the cadets were housed. In these vast open spaces the men slept on the floor, 150 to a row; it seemed that one wall was to serve as our headboard while some planks hammered together would be our footboard. Our bedding, once again, was straw. But there were also tables and benches, and a yard at our disposal, so overall it was a change for the better. There was a second grain warehouse across the yard, connected to ours by wooden fences, so we were locked up on all sides.
A small pond that lay between the warehouses made our yard seem a complete landscape in itself. The eye rests easier on a fence than on a bayonet, and the pond fired our imagination much more than the headstones in Rendsburg, so outside too we found something new to enjoy: we built model ships, fixing scraps of fabric to masts made of sticks and staging naval battles on the smooth surface of the pond. Half the ships sailed under the Danish flag, while the other half—which appeared to be stateless—represented German rebels, whom we could not bring ourselves to honor even with their own colors. During our battles we bombarded the flagless German fleet with pebbles, and we Danes won every time, suffering losses only when one of our fleet took an accidental hit from a stray pebble.
We clustered in our hundreds around the ponds, cheering every time a pebble struck its target and a toy ship tipped over. This was our hour of restitution.
But Laurids turned his back on us, fuming with contempt.
"Yes, that's all we're good for. If only we could win when it really matters."
Laurids spent most of his time in the straw, staring out a window that faced the river Elbe, watching the ships sail to and from Hamburg. His eyes followed them as far as they could, and his heart went even farther. He longed for the sea.
After his trip to Heaven, he'd become a different man.
During the day we'd relax in the sunshine. Benches had been put out in the yard, and some of us played cards. We dictated our letters home to a literate seaman from Ærøskøbing, Hans Christian Svinding. He was never without a notebook in his hand and his eyes were always on the alert; he wrote everything down. But most of the men just stared vacantly into space, halfway to a schnapps-induced haze. In the evening there would be singing and dancing, and the heavy floor planks would creak under our weight. The cadets made the most noise. They didn't mix with the crew but stayed behind the closed doors of their rooms, their drunken shouting drowning out even our music. They were mere boys and couldn't hold their drink. Not one of them was older than sixteen; most were thirteen or fourteen. The youngest was twelve. Many of us had sons their age or older, yet as junior officers the cadets were our superiors, though they knew nothing and could do nothing either. We had to stand to attention to a bunch of cabin boys.
Speculation about Commander Paludan's desertion at the moment of greatest peril remained rife. Why had our commander got into the boat before everybody else? A soldier from Schleswig started the rumor that Paludan had claimed a German officer arrived on board the Christian the Eighth and commanded him off the ship before the wounded could be brought ashore. Paludan protested bravely but was told that if he disobeyed, the bombardment would resume. However, no one on board the Christian the Eighth had known anything about this officer, whose name was supposed to be Preuszer, and the German rebel army denied any knowledge of him. The soldier from Schleswig said he thought that Commander Paludan had invented Preuszer as a cover for his own cowardice.
When Little Clausen heard this story, he opened his mouth to defend his commander: his own honor, as a Dane, was at stake. But he couldn't think of a single argument to make. In fact, the story sounded all too plausible. We'd been led by dishonorable men. Ejnar too stayed silent, but his eyes filled with tears of shame. Laurids swore.
Commander Paludan's treason didn't light the fire of rebellion in us; instead, it sent us more frequently to the schnapps pail. As our disgust at our captivity grew, our manners coarsened.
The cadets became a target for our anger. We'd already cracked plenty of jokes about their smooth chins, but only behind their backs. Now we told the little men to their faces, "Pull down your trousers so we can see if you're hairless there too."
The cadets' leader was a fourteen-year-old w
ith the surname Wedel. He'd been the first cadet of the Christian the Eighth to board a rescue boat, and we'd all noted his triumphant expression as he sat next to Paludan—a close friend of his father—on the main launch. He led the drinking sessions the cadets held behind closed doors. But now he became the most frequent target of our increasingly aggressive bullying.
In response to a particularly cruel reference to the size of his genitalia, Wedel slapped an able seaman, Jørgen Mærke from Nyborg, hard across his face. The fact that Wedel had to stand on tiptoe to do it fueled our mirth—but the slap was a proper one. The seaman stood dazed with shock before hesitantly putting his fingers to his stinging cheek, as though unsure that he'd really been struck.
"Stand to attention, God damn you!" little Wedel roared.
The seaman grabbed Wedel by the shoulders and flung him to the floor, then thrust a heavy sea boot into the boy's chest. A crowd quickly formed around them—not because anyone wanted to rescue the kid, but because here, finally, was a chance to vent our frustrated rage. Wedel was saved only by his screams. Two soldiers from Schleswig-Holstein came charging up the stairs, brandishing their bayonets, but before they reached the boy, Laurids had dispersed the combative crowd, pulling the boy to his feet by the collar while holding off the bystanders with his free hand.
Wedel dangled limp, like a rag doll, fear buckling his legs.
"Now behave," Laurids said in a calm voice.
We, the Drowned Page 5
